We assume we want the truth, but very often we want something else: to make a decision so that we can move on. The dog that wags the tail of information is personal motivation. “The basic understanding that psychology has come to embrace,” Kruglanski said, “is that our opinions, impressions, and attitudes are ‘motivated.’ In other words, our opinions are not formed by information alone, because information can be manipulated and distorted. To my mind, motivation is the force underlying most of human action, and understanding it is the key to successful interventions to change behavior” - preventing individuals from committing violence, for example, or convincing people to study and to acquire education. “This was initially disappointing,” he recently told me, “but I quickly learned that animals, too, are motivated - by hunger and thirst - and to this day I draw on learning and conditioning theory to understand human motivation.
When he studied psychology at the University of Toronto in the mid-1960s, he found the field dominated by neo-behavioristic theory and the study of animal learning. Kruglanski knows a thing or two about both crisis and polarization, as well as the sway that demagogues can exert on individuals, nations and eras.Īs a young man, Kruglanski was attracted to and inspired by Freud’s work on unconscious motivation.
Kruglanski’s view, a craving for certainty drives much more of our decision-making than any of us want to believe or admit, and times of crisis and polarization only serve to ratchet up our craving for that certainty.īorn in Poland in 1939 - a bad year everywhere, of course, but murderously abysmal in Poland - and raised in a Jewish ghetto, Dr. He has crafted a theory of what he calls “lay epistemics,” i.e., the study of how individual thoughts create subjective knowledge. Because here’s the thing: whether we consider ourselves conservative or liberal, radical right or radical left or middle of the road, very few of us ever change our minds once we’ve settled on what we believe is the truth about an issue, scandal or public figure.Īrie Kruglanski, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, has spent much of his decades-long career examining the ways in which people form beliefs and judgments. If Donald Trump’s routine debasement of the Oval Office has not chipped away at his popularity among his hardcore fans, no amount of prodding, cajoling or accurate, triple-sourced reporting will change their minds. Let’s focus, instead, on a more pressing reality: namely, the unlikelihood of the president’s backers ever “converting” to the anti-Trump camp. So what? Fake news! Build a wall! Trucks! Trucks!īut, okay, just … forget all that. That shit is for ivory-tower eggheads and losers who pretend to like “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” So we can’t spell. See? We’re not all that interested in books or history or foreigners. It’s almost enough to make a fake-news junkie believe that Trump and his pals are intentionally making themselves look lazy and dim-witted, as a kind of smirking pledge to their proudly incurious base:
Or with my personal favorite (so far): Trump and the RNC paying tribute to Abraham Lincoln by tweeting out a dreadful, saccharine, fridge-magnet quote and wrongly (of course) attributing it to the 16th president. With an obvious typo on Trump’s official inauguration poster? Du Bois’s name in a Department of Education tweet? Trump’s first two months in office, where should we begin? With the misspelling of N.A.A.C.P. As for the litany of cringe-worthy mistakes and miscues that have characterized Mr. There are so many, ranging from the asinine to the near-sublime, that we probably won’t miss any genuine whoppers if we ignore the president’s unrelenting dishonesty for a few minutes. Let’s forget, for a little while, about Donald Trump’s lies. None of Us Will Change Our Minds About Trump or any Other Fucking Thing Arie Kruglanski and the rigidity of belief.
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